Head of World 100 Mark Sudbury discusses some of the trends in global higher education reputation emerging from discussions at recent conferences, helping to set the scene for our conference in October

This week saw the long-awaited publication of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 results, more than seven years since the last exercise (REF 2014). Undertaken by representative higher education funding bodies of the four nations of the UK, it the most comprehensive evaluation of the research impact of UK universities.

With the rankings still in their relative infancy, there was a change in the methodology for 2022 to include SDG 17 ‘partnerships for the goals, and, as a result, we have a lot more movement in the rankings compared to the more established world rankings tables. We look at a few of the key trends and observations of this year’s release and explore what the future may hold for them

April 2022 saw the debut of Time Higher Education’s new event series for marcomms professionals, Hashtag HigherEd. The conference, hosted by Warwick Business School at the iconic Shard in London, brought together speakers and delegates from both university and other sectors to discuss issues such as branding, social media, sustainability, recruitment, quality of education and international students.

We will be running two seminars for our members where we will present key findings from our 2020/2021 research project, The Reputation Opportunity, and give members the opportunity to join the discussion.

The general public was one of the focuses of the World 100 Network annual research project, just published, which set out to understand whether the high profile of academic faculty during the pandemic has led to institution reputational benefit.

November saw the first World 100 in-person event since the end of 2019 when members and other delegates came together for the World 100 Conference in Manchester. ‘World 100 Live’ was the destination of this meeting; a special event designed for members to share insights and experiences from their university since we last met

How has internationalisation been impacted by the pandemic? And what are the changes driving global reputation in a sector dominated by globalisation and fierce competition, when international visibility has never been more crucial for success. These topics formed the background to a recent session at Times Higher Education’s Leadership and Management Summit.

In 2021, it is impossible to discuss the subject of reputation without looking at the impact of Covid19, and this is perhaps another key sign that an institution’s reputation cannot be solely attributable to rankings.

Rankings and reputation are entwined but reputation is about more than rankings. That was the key conclusion from a World 100-moderated session at the THE Arab Rankings Forum on 27 July. World 100 Director Louise Simpson discussed ‘Using Rankings to Enhance Reputation’ with a panel of experts from some of the biggest universities in the Arab region.

Ask someone on the street to name a prestigious university they will often name institutions with a long, rich history, established hundreds of years ago. But there are numerous institutions all over the world, founded much more recently, that are hot on the heels of those historical, elite universities. One of those universities is Aalto University, Finland, formed in just 2010.

World 100 Director Louise Simpson explored the origins and creative thinking behind the visual identity of Finland’s Aalto University during the THE Young University Summit, when she spoke to their president, Ilkka Niemelä.